Howling Frog Books

 February's stories are "The Pearl of Price," a Parker Pyne story, and "The Affair at the Bunglalow, featuring Miss Marple. "The Pearl of Price" is set on a group tour of Egypt, a nice little closed group of people who do not know each other well and who come from all over.  The rich American's daughter has valuable screw-on pearl earrings, which she is forever losing.  Pretty soon one of the pearls is lost, and though it ought to be easy to find...it isn't there. Who took the pearl and where did they hide it?  Parker Pyne figures it out. This is a fun short piece, and brings up the eternal question: how does anyone ever stand wearing screw-on earrings?  I've tried them!  They hurt! In "The Affair at the Bungalow," we have a dinner party that includes some retired military and police men, a lovely and famous actress, and a clever modern writer along with his elderly aunt.  As they trade stories of crime and try to fool each other, the ...

 Fanda at ClassicLit is doing a fun thing this year, and I'm going to join in.  It's the Agatha Christie Short Stories of 2024!    She has picked out two short stories to read each month. The January stories are "The Coming of Mr. Quin"  and "The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman," an early Poirot story, and there's plenty of time for you to join in. "The Coming of Mr. Quin" was published in 1923 (says my book; Fanda says '24) and was Christie's first published short story.  All the Quin stories feature him and Mr. Satterthwaite, who provides the point of view.  When Mr. Quin arrives, he doesn't solve a mystery; he simply asks a few questions and inspires others to solve the problem.  In this case, several people are gathered at a country home where, ten years ago, a friend of theirs killed himself.  Why?  The answer is crucial to two other people staying in the house... I always like Quin stories.  They're fun, and very differ...

 Did I do it?  Did I hit my goal of 20 books by September 1st?  I did, and also I've been very busy and unable to finish this post.  So here we go... Summerbook #17: The Way to the Sea , by Caroline Crampton:   Crampton does a podcast I listen to ( Shedunnit ), so when she wrote this book I wanted to find a copy, but it was only published in the UK.  It's all about the Thames estuary - the bit between London and the sea -- which is where Crampton grew up, on a boat half the time.  She actually starts at the source of the Thames, but covers from there to Tower Bridge in the first chapter.  After that she gets down to business and covers history, the state of the river, ecology, and throws in bits of her own memory.  People have tended to ignore the estuary or use it as a place to dump things they don't want to look at, from actual garbage to sewage treatment and power stations.  These days the shipping is there too; an absolutely massive...

 First Love and Other Stories, by Ivan Turgenev Wow, Turgenev sure could write.  Here we have short stories written over 20 years of his writing career.  Most of them illuminate a short episode and its meaning for a whole life, or a zeitgeist. "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" is the final diary of a dying man -- though he is only about 30, he has just days to live, and decides to set down the one significant thing that has ever happened to him, and in which he was utterly futile, as he believes his whole life to have been.  He got to know a local family, and fell in love with the daughter (age 17), but Liza never noticed him at all.  She fell instead for a visiting nobleman, and at the end of a romantic summer, he of course left without proposing.  Our narrator wanted to warn her, to help her, to marry her afterwards, but she never wanted any of his warnings or help and married another man. "Mumu" concerns a well-to-do widow living in St. Petersburg -- real...

 ...to read lots of books?  That doesn't rhyme.  I have to do it right. ...to be a robin lightly dressed, concocting soup inside my nest! Mix it once, mix it twice, mix that chicken soup with rice! No, actually, I'm not making soup, I'm reading books.  Quite a few books, so here at the halfway point I'm doing a post.  The Marquis' Secret, by George MacDonald:   I'm a bit of a sucker for these sort-of translated 1980s Bethany House versions of George MacDonald's very Victorian Scottish romances.  This one was originally The Marquis of Lossie , a sequel to Malcolm.  Malcolm, a poor fisher-boy, is the true heir to the estate of Lossie, but his half-sister Florimel (a definite Faerie Queene reference!) thinks she is, and so he becomes her groom in hopes of finding a way to break the news to her without ruining her life.  Confusion and hijinks ensue; Malcolm despairs of influencing his sister for good; and also he falls in love.  Can this ...

  Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes ( The Treasure Chest), by Johann Peter Hebel I have no idea how I got this book; it's been sitting on my tablet for some time now.  A few weeks ago I started reading it at bedtime, for which it is perfect, because it's a collection of short little stories, vignettes, jokes, and so on, usually with a little moral theme.  Johann Peter Hebel (1760 - 1826) was from Basel in Switzerland and spoke the Allemanische or Alemannic dialect of German, which is/was spoken in much of Switzerland, Bavaria, and Baden.  He lived in a few different places in those areas, and I'm going to count him for Switzerland.  Hebel became a professor, a poet/writer, and a deacon in the Lutheran Church.  Eventually he rose to become a prelate and a member of the Parliament of Baden, though what he really wanted to do was be a parish priest in the Bavarian/Swiss borderland.  Anyway, in the first years of the 19th century, he also edited ...

  "We Never Make Mistakes:" two short novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn This is what I mean about my April reading slump -- it took me the entire month to read this very short, very readable volume.  I don't think we can call these two stories novels -- at best they're novelettes or longish short stories.  About 70 pages each.  Also, I love love love the cover design, with its stark buzz saw blade.  There are, of course, no buzz saws of any sort in the stories. "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" centers on Lieutenant Zotov, who runs a small country train station.  It's 1941 and everything is overwhelmed by the recent German invasion.  Trains of troops, goods, refugees, medical supplies...there's not enough fuel to keep them all going, and nowhere near enough food.  Zotov has one competent assistant, Valya, and various other personnel who all seem to be lazy, corrupt, or very elderly. A 'straggler' arrives in the station, a man who has been ...

 I'm going to give in and admit that I have more books to post about than time to post in.  Besides, it's a beautiful spring outside!  So here we go: I continued my March Magics reading with Pyramids by Terry Pratchett , which I haven't read in many years.  It's an early one, about #7, and comes after Wyrd Sisters .  Pteppic, only son of the king of the narrow desert/river land Djelibeybi*, spends his youth in Ankh-Morpork, training as an assassin, but right after he survives his final exam, his father dies and he becomes king himself.  His ideas about bringing Djelibeybi into modern times are not welcomed; here, everything is done exactly as it has always been done, and head priest Dios is present to make sure of that. This is such a fun story, absolutely packed with mayhem, humor, and satirical insight.  I really enjoyed revisiting it. *A pun Americans may not get, since we don't have the British candy jelly babies -- which are basically gummy bears...

  The Eternal Husband and Other Stories , by Fyodor Dostoevsky I picked this one from my TBR pile for February because the Classics Club's dare for the month was to read something that had to do with romance/love.  I looked at my pile, and, well, an eternal husband sounds like it has something to do with love!  Or at least marriage, which isn't at all the same thing in a Dostoevsky novel.  In fact these stories were utterly without romance, even the ones that had marriage in them.   In fact, the first story, "A Nasty Anecdote," is all about a wedding!  Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky is a general, and has spent the evening with two friends, boasting about his liberal credentials.  On the way home, he comes upon the wedding celebration for a very lowly clerk in his office, and decides to prove his boasts by entering the event and being generously kind to his employee.  It goes horribly, horribly wrong.  Everyone is embarrassed, Ivan Ilyich, a non-d...

 The Blythes are Quoted, by L. M. Montgomery The day before her (sadly, almost certainly self-inflicted) death in 1942, L. M. Montgomery turned in one final manuscript.  The editors don't seem to have known quite what to do with it, and while versions were published a couple of times, the whole thing was never published in the form LMM wanted it until 2009. It's a bit of a strange book, because even though Anne, Gilbert, and the Blythe children are the organizing principle of the text, they feel mostly absent.  It's divided into two halves of stories and poems set before, and then after, WWI.  One story goes all the way up to 1939 and the start of WWII.  The idea is that we move between stories, which are about other people in the area, with references to the Blythes here and there, and occasional Blythe family evenings with Anne reading out her own, or later on Walter's, poetry.  After a poem or two there will be a short family dialogue. The stories are m...

 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...

 Minutes of Glory and Other Stories, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o  I've wanted to read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o for a long time, but when I tried A Grain of Wheat , I just couldn't get into it.  I ran into this short story collection and thought that would be a great way to try him out. This is a selected collection of short stories, originally published in 1975 but now put into a second edition with some new stories added.  So most of them are from much earlier in Ngũgĩ's career.  I really liked those early stories; the first three are grouped together as being about 'mothers and children,' so of course I liked those.    Some of the middle group ('fighters and martyrs') were up my alley too, though not all of them.  One, "The Martyr," reminded me of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa -- if you told it from the other side.  (It's not that the stories are at all similar, and in fact I haven't read Out of Africa since 1994, so I don't remember m...

 The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, by Nick Joaquin I really like this wonderful cover image, which illustrates one of the stories.... Nick Joaquin (1917 - 2004) is, as far as I can ascertain, a fairly major Filipino writer.  His full name was Nicomedes Joaquín y Márquez, and he also wrote as Quijano de Manila.  Although his first language was Spanish, he wrote his stories in English, and he wrote for 70 years.  These stories were written over time, with the earliest in the 30s and others in the 60s.   Joaquin started off wanting to be a priest, but decided that his calling was to be a writer.  These stories are suffused with Catholicism both cultural and faithful, but not conventional.  In fact none of Joaquin's characters could be described as conventional; they seem to exist in order to upend expectations. The first stories are set in the days of Spanish colonialism, and are indeed Gothic in tone.  A girl meets ...

 Visible and Invisible, by E. F. Benson This was one of those books that I got from archive.org or something -- who knows when or why.  I wasn't sure what it was, and had no memory of who E. F. Benson was.  (Turns out he wrote the Mapp and Lucia books, which I have never read.)  So, what was this book? It's a collection of creepy stories!  Ghost stories, or vampires, or strange happenings.  And they're really good.  This is Benson's second collection of creepy stories, published in 1923.  I now proclaim that I like Benson more than de la Mare when it comes to ghost stories.   A notable feature of these stories is that Benson finds tall ("Junoesque"), outgoing, attractive, cheerful middle-aged women to be scary.  The competent -- possibly the village busybody -- lady that you meet all the time in Agatha Christie stories shows up in several stories as a likeable secret vampire, or murderer. Seances are also a favorite theme, and I par...

  There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tale s, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya This is the second collection of Petrushevskaya's stories I have read, and she is a great writer, although her material is mostly raw misery, Russian style.  In the other post, I quoted a review blurb as saying, "nothing about it screams 'political' or 'dissident' or anything else.  It just screams."   That said, the 'fairy tale' genre works well.  It actually took me all summer to read this collection; since I often get tired of too many short stories at once, I eked it out over months.  Even so, I can recall first story in the book -- the one about the woman who tried to kill her neighbor's baby -- as though I read it yesterday.  Another story deals with a plague in the city and the family that tries to survive it.  Or there's a teenage girl who dies, and her father makes a deal to save her. Twin ballerinas run afoul of a ...

Tales From A Rolltop Desk, by Christopher Morley Hey, two Christophers in a row!  Ha.  This Christopher, however, was an American journalist type who wrote a lot of funny stories, most famously Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop .  This little tome is a collection of short stories published in magazines in the late 1910s, back when short stories in magazines were the great American pastime.  Just about all of them are set in the journalistic scene of New York City, and they're nearly all funny -- but there's a mystery and a ghost story too!  They feature bright, clever secretaries and young reporters scrambling for their wages -- all the usual suspects for New York stories, and often reminded me of P. G. Wodehouse's New York stories, except these came first.  I wonder if the two knew each other... ...having done a few minutes of poking around, I can't see how the two could have avoided meeting, though there's nothing to indicate a friendship....

Jazz and Palm Wine, by Emmanuel Dongala Emmanuel Dongala was born in the Congo (then a French colony) in 1941.  He studied in US universities during the 1960s, returned to an independent Congo as a professor in the 70s, moved back to the US during the time of civil war in the 90s.  He has written novels, poetry, and short stories -- as far as I can tell, in French.  This collection of short stories was first published in 1982, in France, but they had been written at different times before that, not all in the early 80s.  Dongala's life split between Congo and the US has given him a dual lens -- and a great love of jazz music. The short stories all show a piece of ordinary life for ordinary people caught up in the changing world of post-colonial Congo, and the frustrations thereof.  Having shed the French colonial power, they look for a bright future of freedom, and find instead bureaucratic paralysis, Marxist rhetoric that fails to disguise the same old oppr...

Red Cavalry, by Isaac Babel First off, I just have to say that visually speaking, this is one of the most awesome book covers in the history of the world and I love it.  Of course, what it actually depicts is terrible; it's a Soviet propaganda poster showing a map of Eastern Europe/Russia, with a giant Red soldier stomping on his neighbors -- specifically Poland -- and the neighbors are mostly depicted as bloated plutocrats and outdated military officers.  So it's not that I like the subject matter; it's just an amazing poster showing the official Soviet message -- an arresting primary source and window into this time. This time is 1919 -1920, when the newly-established Soviet Russia and Ukraine are involved in a war with Poland.  The whole thing is complicated enough that I'm just going to direct you to the Wikipedia page on the conflict , but the very short version is that Poland wanted to extend its territory east, and invaded Ukraine, and the Soviets wanted to...